


The task at hand

by Lavender_Seaglass



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M, No Spoilers, Sort of UST, intimate gestures, once upon a time solas had long hair, skyhold is not a tropical place
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-25
Updated: 2018-01-25
Packaged: 2019-03-09 03:15:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13472556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lavender_Seaglass/pseuds/Lavender_Seaglass
Summary: There are many ways in which he helps her. This time, it is with the simple act of dressing.





	The task at hand

**Author's Note:**

> When you don't have a lot of time to write but still want to.

Willing her body up each indifferent step, she coaxes all of herself with whimsical images of what could be awaiting her, if there were any free time. She’d have some of it if she weren’t always so slow and stubborn, and prone to working against her own interests. If she were better—to herself, and others, and a better person in general too—she’d have luxury in the form of more leisurely rest. Curled up under her covers and blankets to read, reclining in front of her fireplace, lingering on her balcony watching the sunlight glint on the guts of glaciers straddling the encircling mist-wreathed mountains. She might even be able to afford herself some time to doze off in the hours outside of the darkest, loneliest parts of the night.

But here she is now, scaling staircases in the forsaken section of the tower leading up to her chambers, a structure which in this part is scantily attended and reverberates with the moans and shouts and occasional sighs of the ever-present wind. Sometimes, when there’s nearly a storm or a full-on storm that is catastrophic, she swears that the thing actually shakes. The stones themselves shiver for cold, isolation, and abandonment, the ancient song of their magic too weak of a muffled, trailing hum to bring them comfort anymore with reminders of better, warmer times long forgotten by anything living.

At the landing before her door she stops for a moment and looks behind her at the climb she just made. Unimpressed with herself and the complaints of her body, as well as the blink of accomplishment she couldn’t squelch before it happened to her, she sucks in chill air and scrunches up her eyes. Then she thinks about what she has to do—the meeting that is actually a dinner with a diplomat she must be ready for, a process she told the ambassador she could manage by herself—and is inspired despite the dour circumstances to move forward with the rest of her day. Going through it will be punishment enough for her lack of aspirations and vigour when it comes to moving from place to place within the bowels of Skyhold. She thinks, she deserves this. She wouldn’t deserve it if she weren’t so lazy.

Then she opens the door, and someone is bent over her desk.

Someone who is singular, someone who is welcome. The sight of his backside is immediately endearing: the drape of his patchwork tunic over his legs, the excess of it rumpled, somehow, even now, where it is gathered in and tamed by his old softened belt, the broad-thread hand-sewn stitchwork at all the seams, done by the hands that she knows are deliberately handling the contents of her desk he’s probably sorting on her behalf, the orange-tinged afternoon light slanting over all of him as he works, the tips of his ears which are just visible and dipping every time he extends his reach to gather something to him in his task.

He would be hard-pressed to find something to do that might make her feel better than she presently does. To her, this is the best thing she could see. Defenses dropped, pretenses suspended, shoulders shaped only by his work, he is as he is, and not in anyway moulded by how the world sees him. Solas is at peace with himself.

As much as she wishes to engage him and let him know that they will have some time together now, she lets him be for a stretch of some seconds. In a shimmer of emotions, in a frisson of regret, she feels inexplicably guilty of what she will to do to him by letting herself be known. He will look at her, he will be glad of her presence, but he will not be purely himself any longer. This is not a sensation she knows how to describe yet. She may be able to identify it, but she cannot illustrate it like he can articulate anything and everything because of his lifetime of traversing the fine, fragile, and subtle landscape of nuances in dreams. All she knows is that she feels it inexorably when she comes into his company, and that she causes this change in him. So she considers herself responsible for the twist in him that cannot be said to _not_ be a wholly negative thing.

Teetering on the edge of this shadowy periphery, she imagines herself as an interloper about to disturb the gentle, skittish animals in their their peaceful partaking of a crystal-clear, cloud-cold spring. She does not think of herself like prey that is being lured in by a hidden, clever thing many would consider a predatory beast. Her innocence in this is not something that occurs to her.

Eventually, she remembers that she has to keep moving. The other parts of her day are proper obligations waiting for her to change her clothes, clean herself up, and make herself decent enough to meet them, and she’s on borrowed time as it is. If she takes too long she knows that Josephine will insist someone come up and help her for the good of the Inquisition. There isn’t time for her to waste being independent and inefficient and so selfish by demanding unhelpful privacy. Already she’s been afforded so many special privileges she otherwise wouldn’t have had in this life.

She has to take that next step forward. She has to perturb him, she has to move through the world and declare to it her enduring, dominating presence. So she takes a step. And then another.

From his position leaning over the document-crammed width of her sturdy desk, Solas goes still for a moment. His clothing, though it does not hug a single curve or flexure of his body, is deeply appealing to her. When he stands up she can visually draw and trace the lines of his broad shoulders tapering into his compact, no-nonsense waist. The tips of her fingertips twitch at the memory of feeling his muscles under her touch, when she last laid hands on him to heal him. Each twinge, sigh, gasp, cough, wheeze, and ache, every single response that might be made, she could feel his body catch and release and play out the reflexive movements to its experience, to his physical reality. If he ever is interested her, in the way that she hopes he might be, then she surely could feel it in this way. With a hand on his shoulder, a palm on his stomach, her eyes nowhere but his, she could feel the reality of his desire.

Solas turns around to face her. Before he smiles, his eyes soften. His skin begins to flush as if refreshed, and he dips his head in something that might be considered reverence in a man like him. “Hello,” he says to her, as if she could reveal to him a timeless secret to happiness.

The feelings he invokes in her strike out at her, desperate for something to be done. Either she can do something, or they will—they just have to have him closer to her in every possible way, as if they are crazed and dying and so in need of his heat. They yearn for her to submit to his beguiling smile and lavish ministrations. Whether he has actually offered these things or not hardly seems to matter to them.

“Ah, don’t let me interrupt whatever you’re doing. In my room,” she teases, simpering. Her shoulders roll inwards and she quickly sweeps her head low, before stretching out and sweeping across the room in a handful of purposeful steps.

“You are not a bother,” he says back to her with an easy earnestness. To make sure she knows how much he means to express his sentiments, he takes a step too, away from the desk and towards her. She has the entirety of his attention for his address, which is, “You are always a sight for sore eyes.”

“If your eyes are so sore, maybe you shouldn’t read so much. Give them a rest, no?”

They look at each other, him down at her, her up at him, both of their heads tilted in the same direction. He reaches for her, brushes a thumb along her cheek that she presses farther into his touch, he takes her earlobe and gently massages it between his thumb and forefinger. She stills, she focusses acutely on this sensation, every bump and every ridge of his shallow calluses capturing the attention of her body.

With an inhalation, he moves in closer until she all that she can see is him. The rest of the is world blocked out. He protects her, his back is turned against it all to shield her. The fingers of his other hand find her sensitive side, trace up her, come to rest at back of her neck. The sudden warmth and steadiness they could plant there makes her giddy—they hold a promise that he may pull her closer to him yet, once he has gazed upon her, and is satisfied with the sight, and compelled to kiss her.

Then he lets go of her. To her surprise—and an internal pang of protest almost compels her to reach back out and stop him—she is allowed her space again as he steps back and moves to get to the other side of her desk. There he rustles a scroll and stacks some sheathes of paper which the wind had disturbed when he had forgone putting a weight upon the stack to hold them down.

“I was just leaving some new material for you to look over when you have the chance,” he says. “I was able to get ahold of something I think might help you with barrier creation,” he continues, and points to the tome in particular he means. It is an old leather-bound one, obviously of an obscure printing, without any tooling or inlay or ornamental gilt applied to its pages—if it ever had one, it has long since faded from the cover and spine.

“You’re fine, Solas.” She shakes her head, reaching out her hand to lay it atop the fingers curled over what he has procured for her. “I appreciate the care and effort you’re giving to me. As always, you help me learn so much. I’m just here to get ready for dinner.”

He keeps his head down as he turns his hand over. Their fingers he threads together, then he closes down around her until he is firmly holding her hand in his. “So early?”

“Mmm.” A nod, a squeeze back at him as she wriggles in his grasp. “The normal time, but this one is going to be a bit more fancy than usual. Josephine has a baron she wants me to impress.”

She herself looks away, at something other than him, as they hold this conversation. Over his shoulder she sees through the open windows, beyond her balcony, past the ring of mountains, to the glowing sky. The golden undersides of clouds fill it. Silvery wisps of mist slither down into the darkening valley, below, to where she cannot see.

Solas comes around to her side before he speaks again. He takes her chin in one hand, draws her to him, insists that she do so when she keeps drifting elsewhere. Her face is tugged to turn towards him and his full-on gaze. He knows, she thinks, how she feels about things like these which her position forces her to do, this noble-like life that she was freed of as the one consolation of being stuffed away into a tower like so much used tissue, unsightly and of no further use to anyone.

Very slightly, very vaguely, he smells to her of something wild and fresh. With the chill and the wind dancing over her face she thinks it’s something that reminds her of running through an ancient alien forest in the foggy dead of night, with feet that barely touch the cool, loamy soil in the rare places it has not been choked out by secretive, frond-fringed undergrowth.

“A baron, is it?”

“Yes. An Orlesian, I think. If we impress him, she says, he may think to bring next time one of his more influential friends. One of the dukes of Hossberg.”

“I see,” he says, instead of, ‘that’s interesting.’ Though he remains calm and occupied by her, a slight shifting of his grip on her chin makes her think that maybe, after all, he’s thinking about this too. Imagining what will become of her this evening, what she faces, in a dim, intimate, candle-lit room with only her and another man in it. The thought this leads her to is this: might Solas wish to make sure she is safe and looked after? This thrills her—though she knows he is not an impractical man in this way. He has never kept her from her duties out of pettiness, or jealousy or fear or even envy. It’s supportive that he mostly is, and is now. Taking his hand and heat away from her, he steps back once again.

“And, would you like help? Or would you prefer some time alone?”

In the wake of the last fading thrill he gave her, a racing hum rushes forward and catches up with what it is chasing, causing her to almost miss a breath at accepting his simple proposal. He has not offered her something like this yet. He has undressed her partially—in their tent, in a shared bedroll, with roving hands, and sometimes gentle hands, depending on how close someone had been to death that day, with a smile or a tight frown concealing deeper, darker feelings, once in her bed before he left her for the night, twice in the rotunda under the noses of all those who missed out on a sight to give them a snigger and some gossip; but this will be the first time he has helped her actually dress. Not to mention in something that is so complicated and finicky and uncharacteristic of her. There are laces that will need to be tightened, tracts of skin that will need special attention she cannot give them.

A bit quieter than she means to, she answers, “Yes.” Then adds, “I would like your help, if that is what you’re offering.”

With a smile that she cannot decipher, he tells her, “That is, in fact, what I am offering, vhenan.”

Together they move over towards where her affects and clothing are kept. Past the untended fireplace, empty now but for a low whistle when a breeze breathes down its length and out into its gaping hearth, along her bed to her nightstand where he stops and waits. Hands crisply folded and held behind his back, feet planted shoulder-width apart. With a warm smile he indicates to her to do as she needs, a nod follows to show he will remain here until he is needed. She is free to go at her own pace. Polite, reserved, and unobtrusive, he waits on her.

She wonders if he doesn’t have anything he’d rather do as she steps forward into her closet and begins to rummage through drawers where she thinks the various components of the dress may be. The ones that aren’t already placed out for her upon a dressform, she gathers to her after a minute or two. With them in hand, and a nervy sort of heat pricking at her skin, she comes back out to him and stops by his side. On the edge of the bed she lays out what she will need to put on her body: a sigh of a shift the embroidered hems of which will show through artfully in the places they are meant to, silken socks that she cannot fool herself into thinking will be warm, a tangle of cords that she was told were ribbons for her hair, and an unyielding swathe of ribbed cloth that will force her body into an artificial shape.

Her fingers run over the rich fabrics of all of these things that are matching shades of luminescent white. Against the dark, heavy weight of the furs covering her bed they are an unmissable sight.

“Well, the shift is first,” she says, “to be worn under everything else.”

“I see,” he says, and he turns around, and so goes with his back to her to stand by her unused fireplace. Without needing to be told to him, her wishes are already respected by Solas. All the time in her life she spent without privacy, to not have her body gazed upon is a privilege. In this secure space she removes her too casual clothes.

When she speaks to him again, she has taken off her tunic and leggings and vest and belt, and pulled onto herself the intentionally impractical bit of clothing that is the shift. It will lay against her skin and is not meant to give her protection from anything, much less the harsh elements atop a mountain. All the same the gossamer nothing of its slippery, irresolute touch makes her shiver as it whispers across her skin like an unbidden spirit grazing her at a too-thin point along the Veil. It covers her like a thin layer of dewy ice. From this point on she will be glad of any additional adornment. Perhaps that is the point, she concludes, of such a flimsy underthing. As she bids him to come back to her, she is ready and willing for the next constricting layer as she is for his touch.

The corset is what she points to next. He picks it up as she turns where she stands. Then he wraps it around her, and she helps him by splaying her fingers over her ribs to keep the loose, unyielding length from slipping.

“I’ll try not to hurt you,” he whispers to her. Even if anyone else were here in her room they would not hear him, only see him leaning over her shoulder and with his mouth close to her ear.

“It doesn’t matter,” she breathes, still free to do so unhindered. “The point isn’t pleasure.”

Quiet, but not unresponsive, he begins to ready the ties at the hollow of her back, at the twin divots that sit just above the swell of her buttocks. His knuckles glance across her skin through the sheer, un-warmed fabric of her shift. He whispers something else, to her, and she thinks that it is this: “Pain doesn’t always have to be only that.”

Then he begins.

Each cinched pair of eyelets is a wrench at her body, the flesh which contains her imperfect self, each yank another one of her tranagessions nailed resolutely onto the path that will lead him up to her spine and the vulnerable softness of her neck, where the final, most damning judgment could be pushed in like a stake, easily, and with little to resist it, piercing through her skin and self and ending her brief existence called a life. With every closing she gasps and each time she can keep less air contained inside of her.

At the end she is breathless, and trembling, and she is sure he can feel it vividly under the two fingers he leaves right at the nape of her neck. His other hand opens down at the narrowest point of her back. Palm open, warmth spreading, the curve of her spine given an exquisitely harsh shape beneath the span of his fingers. She imagines it elegant and graceful, able to limn her front and back in a way that will draw people to her before they can see the sickly sight guttering in her left hand. Her chest is crushed, pushed, and offered as a pleasant plump roundness to be seen from the front swelling, with each bare breath she takes, closer towards the delicate region of her throat.

Only as she looks up does she realise he is waiting for her again. Ready, patient, he stands with the socks folded neatly in hand. Upon seeing her see him, he gets to his knees onto a rug that is nonetheless laid over a stone floor, and without complaint reaches for her from this lower, lesser angle. With each leg he runs his fingers over her calves and brings into them precious heat, briefly attending each inch he traverses. Right up to her knees he reaches, over which the watery fabric goes, before it is secured by the tying off of thin red cords to keep everything in place.

On his knees he stays, as if lingering, or at least not minding this position. Each of his hands is on the back of one of her knees, thumbs pushing into the soft, yielding joints. To look down at him is now unbearable—he looks content, fulfilled, something full brought to the light of his lustrous scholar’s eyes.

Cold and too uncomfortable to remain what feels to her like being alone, she reaches down to him and bids him come back up and join her. He does get up. But not to hold her, as she would like. He steps backwards and leaves her and he goes to get the dress that will come to cover, cocoon, and cradle her this evening.

Skirt, bodice, sleeves long with lace, brocade pulled and plucked and tucked into place: he helps her with all of this until she is trussed into something presentable. Solas behind her already has started on the last step to get her completely ready. He unbraids her hair and begins to brush it. The gentleness with which he manages the strokes, and with the alacrity he teases out tangles with his fingers—she cannot help but think once again there’s evidence of his experience and knowledge of all things. Sure enough he is able to thread around her head without snags the ribbons that would be replaced by a crown or circlet or even tiara if she were anyone else properly entitled to the garments on her body. These as a substitute for something grander will bring out the golden hues of the thick-stitched brocade and shading of her bodice that is meant to shimmer every time it is touched by light. When he is done he has wrought for her a simple and natural coronet constructed by deft, careful hands.

Before she looks into a mirror she has the chance to catch her reflection in his admiring gaze. He makes her feel cherished—the sight he lets her see makes her feel grand, and special, and not out-of-place only because she is here with him nearby. With her body fully turned to him, he reaches out and lets his free hand take one of hers. A thumb rests on her wrist, on the point where he might feel the fluttering of her pulse.

Finally, it feels to her that her she can produce adequate heat for herself. Barely able to breath, maybe, but there is colour rising in her cheeks, her arms, her shoulders.

He will not be accompanying her to dinner. He cannot. His approval, though, of the way that she is before him, is enough. It will be able to see her through the evening, she already knows that, for when she looks for the agitation and the distraught thoughts from earlier, there is nothing to be found. Just her becalmed self, who is not fond of parting from him, but a woman who can stand on her own. Proudly. And with dignity.

“I suppose I should be on my way, then.”

“I suppose you should,” he repeats, a smirk contrasting with the serenity come over the rest of his features. The lewdness of the contrast strikes her as coy, telling of what he might be thinking and—she with a bitten lip has wished—might be desiring. All the same he lets go her after one last touch. Which is a brush of his fingers, along the length of her exposed and bear underarm, up to her elbow, where the softness of her skin registers his touch like a shock of something hard and burning, insistent and restrained, aching and fleeting, an intravenous heat that blazes all the way to her emptying head.

Then Solas pulls away, and the space she has leant into is empty. It’s just air that he once occupied. All evidence that remains of him is in the form of reactions he provoked in her yearning body.

“Well? Before you’re too late,” he says to her, stepping towards her desk, to resume the task he was not so long ago working on. “Later, when you’re done, we can go over some of this material together.” A scroll is now taken up to occupy his hands.

For a moment, she looks at him from across the room, in the same spot at which he left her. She stands there for this observation. He is moving methodically as if he does not need to recover any lost time.

“I would like that,” she says, a last expression of her pleasure in his company before she has to bid goodbye and part. At least that’s only for a little while.


End file.
